Elizabeth Birkelund

Elizabeth Birkelund is the author of The Runaway Wife, to be published by Harper Collins in July of this year, and The Dressmaker, published by Henry Holt & Co. in 2006, by Picador in 2007, Hutchinson and Arrow in England in 2007, Mir Knigi Publishers in Russia, and Auf Bau in Germany. Booklist called the novel "light and frothy, yet an engaging dissection of high fashion and those who determine its whimsical direction." Elizabeth worked as a freelance writer for fifteen years, during which time she wrote a monthly column for Cosmopolitan called "Money Matters," and wrote articles for Glamour, Self, Victoria, Institutional Investor, among many other publications.

Before she began her writing career, she worked in New York publishing for a literary agent and then in editorial during the start up of the magazine European Travel and Life. More recently, she wrote as a fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts in 2013. She currently serves as a trustee on the boards of the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle, North Carolina, and the Center for Fiction in New York.

Elizabeth grew up in New York City and attended the Hewitt School, later graduating from Brown University and the Radcliffe Publishing Course. She has four sons and currently lives in New York City, where she is working on her next novel—tentatively titled Spy in Love—about a French private investigator who falls in love with his subject: a complex and unattainable Irish woman.